First gorillas, now horses – Google Photos app really needs to get its act together

04:37 cherishe 0 Comments

google

In case you missed it, large news agencies such as The Telegraph reported a few days ago that the new Google Photos application was discovered to have been mislabeling some photos of black people with a “gorilla” tag. Although not quite as racially insensitive as that incident, one Japanese net user also discovered that the software similarly mislabeled his father as an animal–only this time, of the equine variety.

African American computer programmer Jacky Alciné was understandably appalled when he noticed that pictures of himself and a friend were tagged as “gorillas” in his Google Photos gallery. He subsequently left the following message on his Twitter account:

And it's only photos I have with her it's doing this with (results truncated b/c personal): http://t.co/h7MTXd3wgo
—
diri noir avec banan (@jackyalcine) June 29, 2015

A Google Photos engineer saw his message and was in turn horrified by the glitch. After an unsuccessful attempt at fixing the bug, he subsequently removed the gorilla tag altogether and promised to keep working on the image recognition software so that the same thing wouldn’t happen again.

This isn’t the first time that the application’s recognition process has messed up. Earlier, a woman reported photos of her dogs being mislabeled as horses. Recently, however, a Japanese Internet user posted a message on Twitter saying that his father had been mistakenly identified as a horse as well–but he doesn’t seem to be too concerned about it at all:

Google Photoで黒人をゴリラと認識した問題で開発者が謝罪したとのこと。そんな中、僕の父は「ウマ」と認識されました。別に謝罪はいりません。 http://t.co/ul47R02H8n
—
志賀雄太 (@flashoman) July 02, 2015

“An engineer apologized after Google Photos mislabeled some black people as ‘gorillas.’ It also mislabeled my father as a ‘horse.’ I don’t need an apology though.”

Sure enough, the photo of his father (circled in red below) is labelled as uma, or “horse” in Japanese:

google2

Maybe it was the fact that his father appears to be standing in a grassy field next to a fence that caused this little blip, but one thing’s for sure–you’re probably better off leaving the labeling to real, live humans until the computers are more dependable!

Sources: Telegraph, CNN
Images: Twitter/@flashoman (edited by RocketNews24)</em>